Tag: reviews

MOVIE REVIEW: Buck

What I did come away with is that I’d like to know people like Buck, BE more like Buck.

The Wife and I left the Adirondacks on Saturday, picked up the mail that was being held. And since the Daughter was still in the mountains with her cousins (and their parents and grandparents), we took the opportunity to go to the Spectrum Theatre to see the movie Buck, which we had seen in previews.

Buck Brannaman travels the country for 40 exhausting months a year, usually without his family, “helping horses with people problems.” As Buck put it, “Your horse is a mirror to your soul, and sometimes you may not like what you see. Sometimes, you will.”

For much of the movie, one might mistake it for a laconic documentary travelogue. But interspersed with an early scene of how Robert Redford probably could not have made this movie “The Horse Whisperer”, based in large part on Buck, without the real Buck’s skills, and you realize that the man is genuine and no “one-trick pony,” as one critic suggested.

Then you find out, in a manner like peeling an onion one layer at a time, how Buck, and his older brother, were performers as children. Their mother died early, and their father – well, let’s say, Buck wasn’t his biggest fan. But the lessons he learned from that experience were what is remarkable.

It’s not a really dramatic film, except for one sequence near the end, which is quite so. What I did come away with is that I’d like to know people like Buck, BE more like Buck. You don’t have to be a big fan of horses to be a big fan of Buck.

Oh, you people who leave at the beginning of the credits: hear Buck’s foster mom tell Buck’s favorite joke before you depart.

Movie Review: Beginners

The Jack Russell terrier got the best lines.

If you like your movie to start at the beginning and end at the end, you’ll hate Beginners.

Let me back up. Around the 4th of July, when the Wife and Daughter went to visit my parents-in-law, I asked the Wife what films she wanted to see together, and she picked Midnight in Paris and Beginners. Then a couple of weeks later, she said, “Guess what film I saw at the movies today? ‘Beginners’.”

OK. So I ended going alone on a hot Sunday afternoon to the Spectrum Theatre, using an old movie pass I discovered in a drawer not that long ago.
Beginners is the story of Oliver (Ewan McGregor), who is still mourning the death of his father Hal (Christopher Plummer). It was only after Oliver’s mother dies that he gets close to Hal, who, at the age of 75, finally came out of the closet and enjoyed his final years. Oliver meets the mysterious Anna (Mélanie Laurent) and wonders if he can devote himself to loving her with the same wild abandon that his father showed at the end. Goran Visnjic also plays a significant role.

A fair portion of the movie involved young Oliver, in flashback (Keegan Boos) dealing with his quirky mother Georgia (the wonderful Mary Page Keller).

I really cared about these people. That’s probably a function of writer/director Mike Mills, who was mining his own experiences. It’s billed as a comedy/drama, and it did have a few good laughs; the Jack Russell terrier got the best lines. It certainly wasn’t raucously funny, and it is a bit oddly uneventful in parts. And for reasons known only to me, I kept thinking that McGregor looked a lot like Jason Bateman in some shots. Beginners is an uneven film. but it has enough insights to mildly recommend.

MOVIE REVIEW: Midnight in Paris

I loved Woody Allen’s pictures. Annie Hall is my favorite, but I’m also fond of many other of his films from the 1970s and 1980s. But at some point, somewhere in the mid-1990s, they became really hit or miss for me. Now I only go if they are reasonably reviewed. So when last year’s You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger got mediocre reviews, I just passed on it, unseen. Bad Woody is painful Woody, because it really reminds me of what was.

So when Midnight in Paris got some positive feedback, I got the Wife to go to the Spectrum Theatre for a Tuesday night show; the Daughter was at the grandparents’ house.

And I loved it. The Wife loved it. This is my favorite Woody film since perhaps Purple Rose of Cairo. But I have a difficult time talking about it because the less you know, the better it’ll be.

I will say that Midnight in Paris is about an engaged couple, Gil and Inez (Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams) visiting Paris. Gil is a hack Hollywood writer who wants to create something more substantial and is finding his current location serving as his muse. Her friend Paul (played wonderfully by Michael Sheen) defines “pedantic”. Carla Bruni, the first lady of France (pictured with Wilson and Allen), adds context as a tour guide.

But the best parts are driven by Kathy Bates, Adrien Brody, and a group of actors I was unfamiliar with, especially Corey Stoll as Ernest. Not to mention Marion Cotillard, who I last saw as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose, who plays a pivotal role.

This isn’t exactly sunny Woody, but it is engaging Woody, an evolving Woody, or Woody proxy in the surprisingly believable Wilson, whose sole voiceover early on could have been spoken by the writer/director 30 years ago. The film also LOOKS brighter than most Allen films, which works here.

MOVIE REVIEW: Bridesmaids

Annie’s mom was played by the late Jill Clayburgh, and that made me a little sad as well.

The Wife and I have been to but one film since February, that being Made in Dagenham in April. It wasn’t for lack of movies we’ve wanted to see, but rather a lack of people to watch the child.

So when we had the chance to finally go on our (not-quite-) monthly date Saturday afternoon, July 2, we decided to go to the movies. I was surprised to discover that my demure bride chose Bridesmaids, which was on my list, especially since it’d been around for a while.

After dropping off the Daughter at a friend’s house, we went to the 12:35 pm showing at the Spectrum in Albany. The Spectrum is more an art-house theater but it shows mass-market films too, to balance the bottom line.

I should note that of the three movies in preview, the one I’d most like to see is Buck, which is a true story of a horse whisperer.

As for Bridesmaids, it was not really what I expected. It was a Judd Apatow film, so I anticipated it to be gross, but it wasn’t as raucous as I assumed. Or maybe I’ve gotten inured to it. The most tasteless sequence actually made some sense in the context of the movie.

Annie (Kristen Wiig, who co-wrote the screenplay, along with Annie(!) Mumolo) is a young woman with a failed business, weird roommates, a dead-end job she got because of her mother, and an unsatisfactory relationship (an uncredited Jon Hamm). But her BFF Lillian (Saturday Night Live alum Maya Rudolph) has gotten engaged, and Annie’s the maid of honor. She soon gets into a competition with Lillian’s much newer friend Helen (Rose Byrne), from which much of the comedy ensues.

The real revelation here is Melissa McCarthy. My wife and I watched seven seasons of Gilmore Girls, where she played the sweet friend Sookie, but my wife did not recognize her here as the take-no-prisoners sister of the groom, Megan. She was probably the best part of the picture. Not incidentally, the guy she sits with within the plane sequence, one of the funnier parts of the film, is played by Ben Falcone, Melissa’s real-life husband.

Mostly though, I thought that Annie was sad, and she was having a nearly movie-long pity party. Not that I didn’t think she was “real”, only that she wasn’t that much fun to be around. Or maybe it was me. Somewhere near the end, a couple of women behind us were laughing hysterically over something in the film, to which I said, as Annie might have, “Really?”

Also, Annie’s mom was played by the late Jill Clayburgh, and that made me a little sad as well.

Still, I “cared” about many of the characters, and I liked the ending. I’m glad I saw it, though I think my wife liked it better than I did.

Book Review: The Orphaned Adult

One of the most interesting things about the book The Orphaned Adult is the very notion that adults, when they lose both of their parents, do fall into a largely unexamined class of people. After all, as the author, Alexander Levy noted, “Parental loss is not the province of an unfortunate few. It is the ultimate equal-opportunity experience, requiring nothing other than children not predeceasing their parents.” So the dearth of literature he found prior to writing this book, published in 1999, is not at all surprising.

The book is an amalgam of stores of Levy’s patients and his own loss of both parents, and how it changed all involved. I’ve written elsewhere about my favorite story in the book.

Early on, he challenges the notion of the Elisabeth Kübler-Ross tidy five stages of grief, while recognizing that the structure served a purpose at a time when many avoided the topic of death and grief altogether. As I’ve noticed myself, grief is nonlinear. And grief, Levy argues, is good; “by illuminating life’s impermanence, grief alerts us to pursue those important goals that we otherwise tend to postpone in the naive belief that our time is enduring.” In fact, he suggests that there are serious hazards in avoiding grief, and offers ways to express it.

The death of both parents changes the “I am” sentences of one’s life, from being your parents’ son or daughter to “I am an orphan.” Yet Levy talks about the ongoing relationships with parents after they die, and how one’s relationships with others can change as well.

Recommended for those who have lost both parents or who are involved with people who have. I have suggested the book to a guy at church who lost his second parent, his mother, about two months after I lost mine.

 

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